Gadgetory

good news there will be more ways to talk to your gadgets I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update Siri has learned a few new tricks Apple's voice assistant now understands your commands to play your favorite podcast Apple updated its podcasts app so you can ask Siri to play all your favorite podcasts by saying the command play podcast or you could just play a specific one by naming the episode or show like cnet update the podcast app also works with apples car play and it lets you share links using airdrop but Siri isn't the only smart assistant getting an upgrade it appears that there's more in store for Microsoft's Cortana and maybe we'll find her eventually on Windows PCs or tablets well at least that's the takeaway from a job listing on Microsoft's website the posting seeks an engineer to help shape the evolution of Microsoft's digital assistant and redefine the personalization experience on windows so that could be more platforms than just the Windows Phone Cortana is rolling out to new Windows Phones this month and she'll be in an update on existing windows phones sometime in June there is something new coming soon from the windows surfaced world Microsoft is holding an event in new york tuesday to unveil surface news Microsoft calls it quote a small event which is likely a tease to the much-rumored surface mini that would be a windows tablet with a 7 or 8 inch screen similar to the ipad mini but there may be more sources still seen it that Microsoft is planning to release an update of the surface pro with Intel's latest Haswell chipset we'll find out for sure on Tuesday May twentieth you can watch the news event live on cnet at eight a.m. pacific 11 a.m. eastern in other Microsoft news let's switch over to the Xbox owners of an xbox will no longer have to pay for a live gold account to be able to access several apps like Netflix finally no more pay wall just use the programs you already pay for and when the switch happens in June you can request a pro-rated refund on the xbox support site to cancel the rest of your gold subscription folks have until the end of august to ask for that refund but you'll probably want that subscription come next year when the new halo game comes out Master Chief returns in halo 5 guardians of the galaxy it's out in the fall of 2015 for the Xbox one console we don't know much about the story but game maker 343 industries released a statement saying it will be a bigger effort to make than halo 4 because it's going to take full advantage of the xbox one's hardware that's your tech news update you can find more on these stories at cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey